d azure, lac'd
With blue of heaven's own tinct."

Also this, from the soliloquy of Posthumus in repentance for the
supposed death of Imogen by his order:

"My conscience, thou art fetter'd
More than my shanks and wrists: you good gods give me
The penitent instrument to pick that bolt,
Then free for ever!"

I add still another example; from one of old Nestor's speeches on the
selection of a champion to fight with the Trojan hero:

"It is suppos'd,
He that meets Hector issues from our choice:
And choice, being mutual act of all our souls,
Makes merit her election; and doth boil,
As 'twere from forth us all, a man distill'd
Out of our virtues."

All these--and I could quote a hundred such--are, to my thinking,
instances of happy and, I will add, even wise audacity: at least, if
there be any overstraining of imagery, I can easily shrive the fault,
for the subtile felicity involved in them. They are certainly quite at
home in the millennium of poetry which Shakespeare created for us;
albeit I can well remember the time when such transcendent raptures
were to me as

"Some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tun'd too sharp in sweetness,
For the capacity of my ruder powers."

It would be strange indeed if a man so exceedingly daring did not now
and then overdare. And so I think the Poet's boldness in metaphor
sometimes makes him overbold, or at least betrays him into
infelicities of boldness. Here are two instances, from _The Tempest_,
v. 1:

"The charm dissolves apace;
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason."

"Their understanding
Begins to swell; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That now lies foul and muddy."

And here is another, of perhaps still more questionable character,
from _Macbeth_, i. 7:

"His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only."

What, again, shall be said of the two following, where Coriolanus
snaps off his fierce scorn of the multitude?--

"What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing